‘The Hand that Wrote
Ulysses’ and the Avant-Texte of ‘Wandering
Rocks’1

Ronan
Crowley

When a young man came up to him
in Zurich and said, ‘May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’
Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, ‘No, it did lots of
other things too.’ (JJII:
114)

In the wake of the Joyce 2002
Papers acquired by the National Library of Ireland, attention has
been refocused on the composition of Ulysses. Pre-fair-copy
drafts are now known to be extant for all but eight of the eighteen
episodes of Ulysses and this paper examines one of the
episodes for which there is still tantalizingly little prepublication
material known to be extant, “Wandering Rocks”. As such
it offers a speculative genetic analysis of the missing documents, by
focusing on their echoes, antecedents and precedents in the extant
avant-texte. A survey of the paratextual apparatuses that
contributed to the episode (newspapers, a children’s
board-game) is offered and the impingement of these elements on the
composition of “Wandering Rocks” will be explored.

“I cannot dictate to a
stenographer or type,” Joyce wrote to John Quinn in May 1917.
“I write all with my hand” (LII:
396). Three years later the manuscript of the “Wandering Rocks”
episode, sent to Quinn from Paris, was to refute this claim, as it is
written in both Joyce and Frank Budgen’s hands. The letter was
written at a time when Quinn, keen to assist in the launching of a
writer whom he suspected of talent, first began accumulating a
collection of Joyce material. In March 1917 he quarrelled with Edmund
Byrne Hackett over the Egoist sheets, which B. W. Huebsch had
used to set up Portrait. Hackett, a Clongowes schoolmate of
Joyce’s, had brought the sheets to Huebsch and after
publication retained them. In response to Quinn’s offer of “ten
or twelve pounds” on the sheets, Hackett set a price of $100
(£20) on the manuscript; half to be paid to Joyce, half to him.
Eventually dispelling Hackett’s claim to the sheets or to any
part of “the fine piece of philanthropy” he had in mind
for Joyce, “the Godly J. Quinn” cabled Joyce directly on
March 13, doubling his initial offer of ten pounds.2
Joyce promptly accepted the offer writing that “Mr Pound will
cable you asking you to send the money through him,
as that seems to me the shortest way” (March 19: LI:
100). Quinn was nettled by what he saw as Joyce’s suspicion of
him when Pound’s cable (“Joyce accepts. Money to be sent
via me. Pound”) arrived weeks before the letter. On April 11,
when the letter finally arrived, he wrote conciliatorily, however,
inquiring after Joyce’s health and congratulating him on the
success of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He also
registered a continued interest in Joyce’s manuscripts:

Is that [the MS of Exiles]
in typewritten form? I should like to read it if it is not too
inconvenient. Of course it has not been published yet. How do youdo your plays? Do youdictate them on the typewriter to a
stenographer, or do youwrite them on the typewriter? Or do
youwrite them and have them copied? What I am getting at is
that occasionally I collect manuscripts (but not as generally as I
used to). And if your play is in manuscript or the “Portrait”
is in manuscript, I should be glad to buy the MS. if youcare
to sell it. That is partly an interest in MS. but more an interest in
James Joyce.

Here is the context for Joyce’s
description of his writing processes in the May letter. The £20
remitted through Pound reached him on April 30 and ill with glaucoma
he responded, via Nora, that “it seems […] unfair that
youshould now pay $100 instead of $50 youfirst
offered” (LII:
395). He ‘begged’ Quinn to accept the pages of
corrections for Portrait and Dubliners as part of the
transaction. In mid-May, recovered from the glaucoma attack, he
himself wrote outlining both his compositional practises and the
dispersal of his manuscripts and hence their unavailability for sale:
“I have here with me only the MS of Exiles. The MSS of
Dubliners […] and of A Portrait of the Artist are
in my desk [in Trieste] and so I cannot easily get them for the
moment” (LII:
396). The brevity of his letter and his reliance on Nora as a scribe
Joyce put down to glaucoma, adding “it seems better and I can
write again.” In addition to the description of his
compositional methods, he also explained, “When the fair copy
is ready I send it to a typist” (as if to instantiate this
process the version of the letter extant in the New York Public
Library is a typed copy Quinn had prepared for an American eye
specialist).3
The end result of the exchange of letters was that Quinn bought the
manuscript of Exiles for £25. He complained of the
document’s illegibility to Pound, who agreed with him, writing
that Joyce was “quite cracked in suggesting that his
unutterable scrawl COULD be deciphered at ANY price whatsoever.”4
Expressing himself less forcefully to Joyce, Quinn observed, “your
handwriting is not the clearest in the world.”5

It was not until 26 June 1919,
when the episodes written amounted to those up to and including
“Sirens”, that Quinn wrote to Joyce asking how he cared
to “dispose of the manuscript of Ulysses.” With
cash readily available for manuscripts, Joyce was, from very early
on, attuned to the appearance of his papers as potential sale copies
(that he knew the full extent of Quinn’s dissatisfaction with
the appearance of Exiles is evident from his limerick to
Sykes: LII:
406).6
While the scope of this paper does not extend to a treatment of the
Rosenbach Manuscript sale-copy portions (“Wandering Rocks”
is after all in-line) the concern for the appearance of his
manuscripts, borne out of his dealings with Quinn, offers an
explanation for the coda Joyce appended to the end of the draft: “pp.
32–48 were written by my friend Francis Budgen at my dictation
from notes during my illness January – February 1919 | James
Joyce” (U-syn 546.28n).7

As is well known, “Wandering
Rocks” is unique among the sections of the Rosenbach Manuscript
in that it is written in two hands. “Nestor” and
“Proteus” both contain marginal additions in, presumably,
Claud Sykes’s hand, copied from Joyce’s postcard
instructions. The verso of a “Circe” sheet, fol. [29v],
on the other hand, contains an approximation of Sarastro’s aria
from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in what may be
Giorgio Joyce’s hand, but “Wandering Rocks” is the
only portion of the manuscript produced, in part, by inditer and
scribe. Despite the claim in his letter to Quinn, the use of
amanuenses was not unknown to Joyce. Among the prepublication Ulysses
materials there are notes in Italian in Lucia’s hand in NLI
36,639/5B, one of the notebooks that make up the Joyce 2002 Papers.
Over the years, as his eyesight failed, Joyce’s reliance on
amanuenses increased: in Nora’s hand there
are the “St Kevin” sketch in Buffalo notebook
VI.B.3.42–45 (see Buffalo VI.B.3,pp. 46–48)
and the composite “Tristan and Isolde” /
“Mamalujo” sketch among the Joyce 2006 Papers. The
composition of the Wake in particular involved a coterie of
“anticollaborators” (FW
118.25–26) the recollections of whom range from
Stuart Gilbert’s acerbic diary-account of taking dictation from
“The Great Man” “curled on his sofa […]
pondering puns” to Beckett’s most-likely apocryphal “Come
in” (JJII:
662).8

Budgen
has left us his own account of the process in James Joyce and the
Making of Ulysses. While he evidently witnessed the composition
of “Wandering Rocks” at first hand, he does not allude to
his involvement in the preparation of the manuscript. Instead the
reader is treated to an early version of the metaphor of Joyce the
engineer “at work with compass and slide-rule, a surveyor with
theodolite and measuring chain or, more Ulyssean perhaps, a ship’s
officer taking the sum, reading the log and calculating current drift
and leeway.”9
How much of this is merely figurative is uncertain since Budgen goes
on to describe the paraphernalia of “a map of Dublin before
[Joyce] on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of
Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time
necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city”
– a concern with the niceties of verisimilitude that can only
have given succour to Clive Hart as he wandered one-legged-sailor
fashion around Dublin with a stopwatch and copy of Ulysses.10
We know that for a period of at least “five weeks” in
January and February 1919 Joyce could do “little or nothing
except lie constantly near a stove like a chimpanzee” (LII:
437) but nowhere in his testimony does Budgen mention the drafts or
“notes” to which sore-eyed Joyce might have directed him
during this period.
Rather we hear of the children’s game “Labyrinth” (see figure)]
bought at Franz Carl Weber’s toyshop on the Bahnhofstrasse
(Weber’s 1914 catalogue gives the name of the game as
“Labyrinth-Spiel”) which Joyce played “every
evening for a time with his daughter Lucia.” The playing board
for this game, on proud display at the Zürich James Joyce
Foundation, is a honeycomb of interlocking but unclosed hexagons that
form a multicursal route from one side of the board to the other. The
object of the game was to traverse the field and then return to the
starting point, the player being occasionally obliged to miss a go or
two when his (or his daughter’s) token was moved into a hexagon
marked with one or two dots. Budgen records that as a result of
winning or losing at the game Joyce “was enabled to catalogue
six main errors of judgement into which one might fall in choosing a
right, left or centre way out of the maze.”11
Since Joyce had Budgen assisting him, we are bereft of any letters he
may have cared to write to the latter apropos the composition of
“Wandering Rocks” and in the absence of substantial
prepublication material what we have is an avant-jeu de société.

Since the emergence of the Joyce
2002 Papers and other recent unearthings, there are still eight
episodes of Ulysses for which we have no early documentation
other than the Rosenbach Manuscript , namely “Telemachus”,
“Nestor”, “Calypso”, “Lotus Eaters”,
“Hades”, “Aeolus” “Lestrygonians”
and “Wandering Rocks”. In the case of “Telemachus”
a related document, the early Martello Tower fragment, is extant
(located at the British Library). For several of these episodes the
situation is complicated further by the fact that their one element
known to be extant is the out-of-transmission Rosenbach Manuscript
portion. But despite its inline manuscript, the avant-texte of
“Wandering Rocks”, that chapter of surfaces, comprises
very little material for the genetic critic’s depth-plumbing
analysis. One explanation for this paucity might be that “Wandering
Rocks” was the last episode to be planned. When Joyce wrote to
Weaver in May 1918 he described the broad structure of the book as he
then saw it: “the Telemachia [sic],
that is, the three first episodes. […] The second part, the
Odyssey, contains eleven episodes. The third part, Nostos,
contains three episodes. In all seventeen epiodes” (LI:113). Unless Joyce had simply made a numerical error, it seems
that one episode of the book was not conceived of prior to May 1918;
“Wandering Rocks” a centrepiece added to Ulysses that
offsets the possibility of a centre by bringing the number of
episodes up to an even number.12
There is no centre to the labyrinth of Ulysses, only the
difficulty going in (or laborintus to give the
standard medieval etymology).13
Structurally outside of Homer’s Odyssey, explicit
evidence for “Wandering Rocks” cannot be found in Joyce’s
early notebooks for Ulysses.14

The earliest Ulysses notebook
known to be extant, the so-called “Subject Notebook” NLI
36,639/3, does in fact contain a small cluster of “Wandering
Rocks” entries; a scant four lines of notes headed “Names
and Places” on p. [12r] contains the notes “Sherlock”
(U 10.1011), “bQuigley” (U 10.1125)
and “bO Connor (Wexford) palmnut meal”. The
first two notes appear in the pages of the Rosenbach Manuscript
written by Budgen (fols. 35 and 40 respectively). The third note was
transferred to a page of “Wandering Rocks” notes in a
later notebook, NLI 36,639/5A, as “O Connor Palm Nut Meal
Wexford”. There it is crossed out in blue and enters the text
as a second-round addition to the typescript as “with sacks of
carob and O’Connor’s palm nut meal,
O’Connor, Wexford” (TS V.B.8, fol. 9, JJA 13:15;
U-syn 496.9–10, now U 10.434–35). While a
cluster of “Wandering Rocks” notes occurring in
four-lines of notes is suggestive of early planning, they can be
found on a page containing, as the title indicates, proper names and
business premises. It is hardly surprising that several such notes
end up in the episode dedicated to the city itself (other notes on
the page can be found in episodes as diverse as “Calypso”,
“Circe” and “Ithaca”).15
Postulated elements of the “Lost Notebook” that end up in
“Wandering Rocks” include details from the entry on
Silken Thomas in the Dictionary of National Biography and an
account of the General Slocum disaster lifted from The Times.16
The next notebook known to be extant, Buffalo commonplace notebook
VIII.A.5, with its entries garnered from Joyce’s
Zentralbibliothek reading around the subject of the Odyssey,
does not contain material for “Wandering Rocks” to quite
the same degree that it does for the other adventures (though Herring
does trace the blue-crossed entries “blub lips” on p.
[10v] and “ZYZI blub lips” on p. [17r] to “Wandering
Rocks” U 10.1273, which is present in the Rosenbach
Manuscript, fol. 47.17
The duplication of “blub lips” found in “Lotus
Eaters” (“sitting round in a ring with blub lips,
entranced”) incidentally, is much later; added around 30 June,
1921 on the first setting of gathering 5; JJA 22:247, U-syn
160.16, now U 5.335–36). There are no “Wandering
Rocks” notesheets known to be extant (there may never have been
any) and the four late notebooks Buffalo V.A.2, NLI 36,639/4,
36,639/5A and 36,639/5B contain among them only three pages headed
“Wandering Rocks”: 36,639/4, p. [5v]; 36,639/5A, p. [7r];
and V.A.2, p. [10r].

If one brackets off the
additions made to the typescript exemplars and proofs in Joyce’s
hand, then really the only substantial body of autograph material
available for “Wandering Rocks” is the Rosenbach
Manuscript. Because of the particular appearance of the manuscript,
however, it is stratified in a manner that lends itself to genetic
criticism. Joyce wrote the sections dealing with the “Roman”
up to the end of the fourteenth section, U 10.954; Frank
Budgen wrote Martin Cunningham’s exit from the Castle to
the “British ensign” ending the episode.Not only are fols. 32–48 written in Budgen’s hand
at “dictation from notes”, but together he and Joyce went
back and revised the entire manuscript, including the earlier portion
in Joyce’s hand, making additions and corrections. Then, when
he had recovered from his illness, Joyce went back over the entire
Budgen-revised manuscript. As later scenes were written, earlier
pre-emptive intrusions of the same material had to be updated. So,
while no earlier draft survives, by stripping away the later layers
of additions in Budgen’s hand, a draft within the draft of
“Wandering Rocks” can be discerned. By focusing on the
earlier stratum of the intrusions, pre-Rosenbach Manuscript versions
of the corresponding sections emerge. Within the plane of the
manuscript errant wanderings across the
board are inscribed.
While the issue of why there are no early drafts of the episode
remains unresolved, by examining the
interpolations in this way, intimations are given of fragments of a
lost draft or set of notes.

The first indisputable
interpolation, Denis J. Maginni “walking with grave deportment”
past Dignam’s Court (U 10.56–60), does not appear
in the Rosenbach Manuscript. It was one of the last passages to be
added to the chapter, as Fritz Senn has pointed out,18
in September 1921 (JJA 24:20). In any case, the three
instances of Maginni (all of which were added on the page proofs),
exist in a marginal relation to the rest of “Wandering Rocks”
in that they point outside of the episode, for the reader to
“Lestrygonians” U 8.98 (this, the first appearance
of Maginni, was the last written, however: early October 1921, JJA
23:140) and for the genetic scholar to the earliest extant draft of
“Circe” (where Professor “Maghinni” first
“presents himself” in the text of Ulysses: Buffalo
V.A.19, p. 21r, JJA 14:235). Similarly, the three instances of
the crumpled throwaway’s progress down the Liffey, in sections
four (U 10.294–97), twelve (U
10.752–54) and sixteen (U 10.1096–99) exist in
a vacuum in relation to the rest of the episode (they also index
“Lestrygonians” U 8.57). They are divorced from
the action, acting as tokens of time’s passage rather than its
simultaneity. All three instances appear on the Rosenbach Manuscript
as additions in Budgen’s hand. The first two seesaw about a
chiasmus: “A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming”
passes the quays (U-syn 486.34–487.2) and then the quays
further east are passed by “a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, […]
Elijah is coming” (U-syn 514.21–23). In the third
instance this constant element undergoes condensation: “Elijah,
skiff, light crumpled throwaway” (U-syn 534.36). The
second occurrence of the throwaway replaces what was the first
element of another set of interpolations: the cockle-pickers’
return from Sandymount Strand. Now mentioned only in sections
thirteen (U 10.818–20) and nineteen (U 10.1274–77),
the two women feature in section twelve of the manuscript, in an
interpolation which was heavily revised before being discarded
altogether.

Section twelve interpolation,
basic text in Joyce’s hand:

Two bonneted women trudged along
London bridge road, one with a sanded umbrella, the other with a
black in which nineteen cockles rattled (U-syn
514.23–25).

Section thirteen interpolation,
basic text in Joyce’s hand:

Two old women, sanded and
seaweary, trudged from Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a
sanded tired umbrella, one with a midwife’s bag in which eleven
cockles rolled (U-syn
518.24–27).

Joyce caught the mismatching
number of cockles but it was not until Budgen was revising the
manuscript that the word “bag”, presumably lost in the
transferral from an earlier document, was restored to the earlier
interpolation. Joyce also had Budgen correct the motion of the
cockles in line with the second interpolation and the final
appearance of the cockle-pickers at the end of the episode: “two
dusty ^sanded^ women halted themselves, an umbrella
and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled” (U-syn
546.19–20: in Budgen’s hand). As an interpolation in the
second Stephen section, the old women’s progress through
Irishtown is accordingly cast in the language of “Proteus”,
the women are “weary” (U 3.464, 468) and their bag
is “a midwife’s” (U 3.32: “Wandering
Rocks” also supplies an authorial gloss on “gamp”).19
The discarded interpolation in section twelve, however, while it may
offer a glimpse of an earlier version of this paragraph, does not
give a neutral vision of the cockle-pickers and their “bonnets”
(U 7.935), refracted as it is through the “Aeolian”
lens of Stephen’s Parable of the Plums (itself indebted
to the scene on the beach). Perhaps this explains its ultimate
absence from all but the synoptic edition of Ulysses.

Let us return to the first
section of the episode; it features two versions of Father Conmee
boarding the outward-bound tram. The second of these is present in
the body of the Rosenbach Manuscript (in Joyce’s hand: U-syn
476.14–16) though the bridge is initially given as “Annesley
bridge”. The interpolation of this action into section two is
also in the manuscript (U-syn 482.12–13) where Conmee
steps, again, onto a tram at “Annesley bridge” as Corny
Kelleher lolls against a doorframe. It was not until the first
portion of the manuscript was being revised in Budgen’s hand,
however, that the verbal and visual chiasmus of two Christian
clergymen boarding and disembarking on Newcomen Bridge was
established (U-syn 476.8–13). Joyce had caught the error
of “Annesley” for “Newcomen” in the passage
interpolated into section two and made Budgen change it. The Conmee
section remained unchanged, however, until Joyce himself was revising
the manuscript after he recovered from his illness. This oversight
suggests that it was the interpolation that prompted the additions in
Budgen’s hand and not the U 10.113–14 account of
Conmee boarding the tram (the spatial arrangement of the material on
the folio makes it clear that Joyce’s emendation postdates the
scribal addition: Facsimile MS “Wandering Rocks”,
fol. 3). The second bridge, where the old woman alights, is given as
“Newcomen” in the draft and was not corrected until Joyce
was revising the typescript for serial publication (the relevant
typescript page is not extant but the Little Review text gives
“Annesley”, Little Review vi.2, p. 37).20

Section nine, Lenehan and
M‘Coy’s walk through Temple Bar, is punctuated by
numerous interpolations and is the sectional origin for several in
the other sections. One of the former category, an interpolation from
section eighteen, describes Patrick Dignam on William Street. In
Joyce’s first version Master Dignam stands at Mangan’s
counter waiting for pork steaks (U-syn 502.6–8). The
sectional origin of this, in Budgen’s hand, sees Dignam having
left the butcher’s and walking along “warm Wicklow street
dawdling” (U-syn 536.26–27: a cancelled ‘F’
in the manuscript implies that Budgen almost restored the “late”
name to the premises). When he had recovered from his illness Joyce
went back over the entire Budgen-revised manuscript and worked the
language of section nineteen into the section nine interpolation.
Mangan’s became “late Fehrenbach’s”; young
Dignam carries “a pound and a half” of pork steaks. While
the interpolated version is more simplistic, it cannot with
conviction be called a genetic antecedent to the opening of section
nineteen. For a more compelling example of this phenomenon we turn to
an interpolation in section eleven, the meeting of Simon and Dilly
Dedalus outside Dillon’s auction-room. Simon pauses, tongue in
cheek, father and daughter on a spotted hexagon, as it were, while
the Rosenbach Manuscript narrator tells us, “Mr Kernan, pleased
with the order he had booked, walked boldly along Thomas street”
(U-syn 510.8–9). This sentence is repeated word for word
at the opening of the following section. For
“five weeks” or so (LII:
437) the sentences remained the same until, with his eyesight
restored, Joyce made
a series of revisions specifying place, “From the sundial
towards James’s gate”; Kernan’s destination and
employer, “Pulbrook Robertson”; and changed the street
name from Thomas to James’s Street (Facsimile MS “Wandering
Rocks”, fol. 23).21
The earlier genetic state, the interpolation to section eleven with
its mention of “Thomas Street”, remained in the text
until Joyce was correcting the typescript for serial publication
(Little Review, vi.3, p. 33; the change is extant on
Darantiere’s copy, JJA 13:20). The two occurrences of
this sentence appear on the rectos of adjacent folios in the
manuscript (fols. 22–23); one wonders whether the positing of
an exterior document (a draft or a notebook) would be justified.
Rather, the sense is of the manuscript of “Wandering Rocks”
acting as its own note repository, as a notebook whose elements can
move ‘upstream’ to be redeployed in later sections.
Granted, the fluidity of the Ulysses notebooks is absent in
the manuscript (and of course transferred elements are not struck
through); we do not find disparate entries speculatively constellated
under Homeric rubrics, but rather fragments deliberately introduced
(the only word for it is ‘interpolated’) under the
asterisk-string section dividers in accordance with whatever
timetable Joyce had devised. For certain portions of the text, it
seems, the draft acts as its own storehouse of material.

Simon Dedalus and Father
Cowley’s meeting on Lower Ormond Quay in section fourteen (U
10.882–83), interpolated into section twelve (U
10.740–41), provides a comparable example. In this case the
repetition abides in the final text but to arrive at that concordance
involved a degree of jury-rigging. To Cowley’s salute, as it
appears in the manuscript interpolation, Dedalus merely “answered”
(U-syn 514.8–9). In the section he answers “stopping”
(U-syn 522.21–22). To this Joyce adds, on the typescript
copy for Darantiere, Cowley’s question “How are things?”
(TS V.A.8, fol. 18, JJA 13:24.) The passage interpolated into
section twelve is now out of sync on two counts. This was rectified
on the first setting of the passage as placard 26 (JJA
18:270). Such word-for-word correspondences in the final text
indicate events which are happening simultaneity. But “Wandering
Rocks” also contains intrusions which act as tokens of time’s
passage in the episode: Maginni’s progress from Great Britain
Street to Grafton Street; the wending of the throwaway down the
Liffey; and the two bicycle races around the closed circuit of Dublin
University College Park.

In “Eumaeus”
Bloom reads the result of the Gold Cup in the “pink
edition extra sporting” (U 16.1232) of the Evening
Telegraphfor
Dublin, 16 June 1904, “on page three, his side” (U
16.1276–77). If he had looked over at the next column he
would have found himself reading the “Wandering Rocks”
episode of Ulysses for, as is well known, the two accounts of
the wheelmen’s gyring are lifted from the last pink.22

CYCLING AND ATHLETICS.

–––––

Dublin University Bicycle Club
Sports.

This combination meeting of
Dublin University Bicycle and Harrier Club was held this afternoon in
College Park. Coming so quickly after the College Races last week, it
was not surprising to find the attendance on the small side. The
weather, after a fine morning, broke down at the time of starting,
but afterwards the atmospheric conditions improved. Sport opened with
the Half-Mile Bicycle Handicap, and from that the events were rattled
off in good order. The band of the Second Seaforth Highlanders was
present during the afternoon.

The account
concludes with a two and three mile handicap and the “One Mile
Bicycle Club Championship”. For the half-mile race, U
10.651–53, an addition made to the Rosenbach Manuscript,
fol. 21, in Budgen’s hand, Joyce conflated the four winners of
the two half-mile handicap heats. For the quarter-mile (i.e. 440
yards), U 10.1258–1260, a marginal addition on the
Budgen-inscribed portion of the Rosenbach Manuscript (in Budgen’s
hand), fol. 47, the names of the race’s winners and also-rans
are listed off in the order printed until, coming to “J. J.
Comyn” and perhaps wishing to avoid an avatar of himself, Joyce
retreated to the top of the column and plucked Huggard from the first
unmined race, the first heat of the 120 yard handicap. As has been
observed elsewhere, the newspaper’s “Greene”
became “Green”, “Jones” “Joffs”
and “Adderley” “Adderly” (U-syn
546.1–3) in the transfer to the Rosenbach Manuscript. But those
who would replenish the ranks of the collegiate cyclists and restore
errant initials from the Evening Telegraph report must be wary
of literals and compositors’ errors. Maurice Cherry
Greene appears variously as “C. M. Greene”, “M. C.
Greener” and finally “M. C. Greene”. George
Newcomon Morphy, if one were to judge from his presence in the first
heat of the half-mile and in the “Three Miles Flat Handicap”,
was a spud Murphy. Small potatoes perhaps, considering that the
uncommon name Morphy was accurately recorded in the last pink’s
account of the 440 yards handicap and from there worked into
“Wandering Rocks”, but also an instance of the
newspaper’s “bitched type” (U
16.1263) problematising attempts (whether by Joyce or his
editors) to bring the text of Ulysses in line with the
historical reality of that day in June 1904.23
Did Joyce know that this was one of the only races reported in the
newspaper that actually got the participants’ names right? I
doubt it. More likely, he was interested in indicating the passage of
time by juxtaposing the opening race with one further down the
programme (the 440 yards is also one of the few races that doesn’t
feature cyclists who also competed in the half-mile handicap).
Otherwise, whither “Green” and “Adderly”?
Whom are we to blame for the dropped silent es and the transformation
from “Jones” to “Joffs”? The hand is Budgen’s
but the inditer is Joyce. It is difficult to imagine him, however,
reading the miniscule print of the newspaper to Budgen “during
my illness” and given the deft use of his source, it seems
unlikely that Joyce merely directed his scribe to the column. An
intermediary first-order or later notebook or a draft can be posited
between the newspaper and Budgen’s caligraphy.24

John Kidd’s labyrinthine
spiel about “the old boy of quad and green” Harry Thrift,
while it provided convincing rhetoric for his “first salvo”
in the Joyce Wars, rests on an error that has nothing to do with
Gabler’s editorial practices or the use of facsimiles.25
Consulting the manuscript (or its facsimile) reveals that a
graphological peculiarity of Budgen’s hand is responsible for
the error: two fundamentally different capital Ts appear almost
side-by-side in the words “H. Thrift, T. M. Patey”
(Facsimile MS “Wandering Rocks”, fol. 47). The
first T of “Thrift” is a cursive whereas the spelt-out
initial letters result in a two-stroke taucross. The Munich
team concluded that these were two different letters. They plumbed
for an S in the former case and scandal ensued. However, the first
word of this same folio of the manuscript, “Thither”,
should have resolved this crux for them: it begins with a cursive
capital T similar to that found in “Thrift” (and there
are any number of other examples in the seventeen pages of the
manuscript that are in Budgen’s hand).

While “Shrift” is
demonstrably wrong because Budgen wrote “Thrift”, how are
we to approach the other wheelmen? Are the names “Green”
and “Adderly” wrong because these were real men whose
names were x-ed in the transfer into notebooks or the Rosenbach
Manuscript? In short, the issue is the degree of verisimilitude we
demand of Ulysses. The same episode of the book moves the
Mirus Bazaar inauguration to 16 June from 31 May 1904 and calls the
Grand Canal the Royal (U 10.1273). If plausible reasons can be
put forward for these particular distortions (part of the
“disingenuous simplicity” of the episode’s
narrator, in Clive Hart’s words) what of apparent slips of the
pen?26
To be “nettled not a little” by Greens and Adderlys “(as
it incorrectly stated)” (U 16.1262)
is to expect of Ulysses a fidelity to minutiae while at the
same time condoning the more overt liberties it takes with historical
events and places. The appearance of “L. Boom” (U
16.1260) in the fictional Evening Telegraph would seem to
sanction such newspaperly or mediatory divergences from accuracy.
“These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto
undreamt of” (LI:187) Joyce wrote to Weaver in
September 1922, a tone which may suggest, in the light of the several
months he had spent compiling errata, a softening of his attitude
towards certain types of error. For, more so than
towards the underpining reality of Dublin, 16 June 1904, Ulysses
is textually orientated; first outwardly to Thom’s
and documents like the last pink (and from the former of which it
inherits a botch of misprints) but, more fundamentally, its emphasis
is on an internal textuality. W. E. Wylie is not, after all, William
Evelyn Wylie another “man in the bicycle race in Ulysses”
for most readers so much as the brother of Gerty MacDowell’s
erstwhile sweetheart, wily Reggy.27

A twenty-five-page typescript
was prepared from the manuscript and sent to Pound “some days”
before February 25 (LII:
436); portions of two of at least three exemplars are known to be
extant (U-syn 1739). A further page of typescript (which Hans
Walter Gabler lists as lost: U-syn 546.18n) is item 59
in Bernard Gheerbrant’s “Catalogue de l’exposition
‘James Joyce et Paris’”:

Gheerbrant had earlier curated
and catalogued the “James Joyce: Sa Vie, Son Œuvre, Son
Rayonnement” exhibition in the Librairie La Hune, Paris but the
page of “Wandering Rocks” typescript was exhibited at
“James Joyce et Paris” in 1975; long after the University
at Buffalo had acquired the two extant typescript exemplars as part
of the Sylvia Beach collection in the winter of 1959. The longer of
the two fragments, TS V.B.8a, is missing only its third and final
page and it is clear that Gheerbrant’s item 59 is the final
page of this exemplar. The Archive reproduction of the 8a
typescript ends on fol. 24 with Mr Eugene Stratton’s “blub
lips” (U 10.1274, JJA 13:30) and in the Rosenbach
Manuscript the typist, presumably, underlined the next word “agrin”
to denote the start of a new page (Facsimile MS “Wandering
Rocks”, fol. 47). The end of fol. 47 and entirety of fol. 48 –
the final nine lines in the Gabler edition – thus make up a
twenty-fifth typescript page; the “cinq lignes nouvelles
autographes” refer to additions made to this page which are not
present in the Little Review (vi.3, p. 47) but which do appear
in the first setting of this passage in proof as placard 28
(JJA 18:305). These five lines, which Gabler accordingly gives
as second-level typescript overlays, can be inferred as
Lansdowne/Landsdowne Road (which is thus either Joyce or the
compositor’s error) and “the house said to have been
admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her
husband, the prince consort, in 1848” (U-syn 546.22,
25–26. In the first setting of placard 28 the year of
the queen’s visit is changed to “1849”, JJA
18:305). This final page is now in a private collection in the
UK.

No indication as to the
whereabouts of the missing fol. 3 of Darantiere’s copy of the
typescript is forthcoming, but through collation of the Little
Review and relevant placard its autograph contents can be
inferred. Five discrete additions were made to this missing page,
additions not in the Little Review (vi.2, p. 37) but which are
all found in the first setting of this passage in proof (placard
24, JJA 18:235). Therefore they must have been added on
Darantiere’s copy of the typescript (Gabler has them all down
as second-round typescript additions: see U-syn 476.8–478.31
for his synoptic edition of the missing page). While the typescript
may be irretrievably lost, each of the additions has an extant
material antecedent: each can be traced to a source in NLI 36,639/5A,
p. [7r]. All of the blue-crossed entries on this page, which is
headed “7. Wandering Rocks”, seem to have been added on
the second-round typescript. The five additions made to fol. 3 are
reproduced below; bold indicates the words that derive from entries
in the notebook.

Passing the ivy church he
reflected that the ticket inspector usually made his visit
when one had carelessly thrown away the ticket. The solemnity of the
occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee excessive for a
journey so short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum (U
10.118–21).

and smiled tinily,
sweetly(U
10.127).

as she had nearly passed
the end of the penny fare(U 10.137–38).

when their last hour came like a
thief in the night (U 10.146–47)

Lord Talbot de Malahide
[…] lord admiral of Malahide and the seas adjoining.
Then came the call to arms and she was maid, wife and widow
in one day (U 10.156–58)29

The first of these additions,
and the longest, can be traced to two spare notes on p. [7v] of the
notebook: “bFr Conmee & ticket inspector”
and “bIvy church (N. Strand)”, the first of
which stood as a mnemonic for the longer scene. The last addition, by
contrast, is almost entirely composed of material already present in
the notebook. It is built out of a cluster of blue-crossed entries
occupying four lines around the bottom of the page; Joyce needed only
to add a few connecting phrases in the transferral from notebook to
typescript.

One possible feature of the
missing page of typescript, not attested to by any autograph copy, is
the alteration of “Mr Eugene Stratton grimaced” at U
10.141 to “grinned”. Hans Walter Gabler gives the
former reading, going on the authority of Rosenbach Manuscript
“Wandering Rocks” fol. 4 (U-syn 478.8 and note)
but “grinned” is present in both the Little Review
(vi.2, p. 37) and on the first setting of placard 24 (JJA
18:234). Therefore, the alteration must have been made on at
least two of the typescript exemplars. The entire marked-up
typescript, with its two missing pages shadowily restored, differs
significantly from the Rosenbach Manuscript in two places: at points
on fols. 44–45 of the manuscript. Neither U 10.1196–97
“From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s
office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage”
nor U 10.1220–23 “A charming soubrette, great
Marie Kendall” &c. is present in the Rosenbach Manuscript
yet both are found in the body of the typescript (TS V.B.8a fols.
23–24, JJA 13:29–30). Again, no autograph copy
attests to these additions. However, caret marks have been inserted
at the appropriate points in the manuscript, presumably by the typist
(Facsimile MS “Wandering Rocks”, fol. 43–44).
One can envisage Joyce sending a postcard or two to his typist, like
those he sent to Claud Sykes for the Telemachiad episodes, giving the
text of the addition and its point of entry in the manuscript.

My treatment of the “Wandering
Rocks” avant-texte only highlights the paucity of
material that is known to be extant for the episode. While we have a
few pages of late notes, the dearth of evidence of early planning can
be attributed to the short period of time which elapsed between
Joyce’s first conception of “Wandering Rocks”,
sometime after May 1918 (LI:113), and the drafting of the episode at the beginning of 1919
(the Rosenbach Manuscript of “Scylla and Charybdis” was
finished on “New Year’s Eve | 1918”, U-syn
468.23n). As we have seen from the use of the Subject Notebook
and the Alphabetical Notebook, this period of six or seven months was
buttressed by material collected at earlier times. Joyce compiled
notes on Dublin places and people as a matter of course, not with a
“Wandering Rocks” episode in mind, but once the episode
was conceived, the notes were parsimoniously put to that end.

Arthur Walton Litz, in his
treatment of the Martello Tower fragment at the British Library (JJA
9:1219–1222), describes the “fascinating career of
revisions” undergone by the passage describing the Dedalus
kitchen.30
Prose in the British Library fragment is whittled down to laconics in
the notesheets: BL “Cyclops” 1:18–20 reads
“bDilly’s kitchen: oatmeal water, cat devours
charred fishheads and eggshells heaped on square of brown paper,
shell cocoa in kettle, sootcoated” which is pared down further
on BL “Eumaues” 5:55–57: “sDilly’s
kitchen. Oatmeal water cat devours charred fishheads & eggshells
heaped on brown paper. Shell cocoa in sootcoated kettle.” From
the latter the passage was worked into “Eumaeus” (U
16.269–78) but the Dedalus kitchen also features in the
fourth section of “Wandering Rocks”. While it does not
appear to have any textual origin in “Dilly’s kitchen”
the chequered career of the latter sets a precedent for the process
by which material for “Wandering Rocks” was likely
gathered. A “mosaic of movements” (U
15.4100) from stray pages and notebooks into “Wandering
Rocks”-rubriced note repositories created the storehouse of
elements necessary to begin drafting. Whether shorthands like
“Fr Conmee & ticket inspector” or “Dilly’s
kitchen” were derived from scenes written out or stood as
mnemonic triggers for scenes composed mentally, the episode became
such a catch-all that disparate material could be shoe-horned into
its nineteen sections.

The absence of pre-Rosenbach
drafts can be subsumed under the general question of why so few
drafts survive for the early adventures. This lacuna in the
prepublication Ulysses dossier has never been satisfactorily
accounted for and perhaps additional manuscripts remain to be
discovered; until the discovery of the Joyce 2002 papers, the breach
stretched all the way from “Calypso” to “Wandering
Rocks”.31
But for the tenth episode the matter is complicated by Frank Budgen’s
involvement. If we assume that Joyce did not start drafting
“Wandering Rocks” until the beginning of 1919, he cannot
have spent long at the episode before his eye trouble obliged him to
seek Budgen’s assistance. The Rosenbach Manuscript is not a
first draft but what antecedent can be posited for it? Such a draft
was likely to have been written in a copybook and, like the early
drafts of some of the other episodes, must have been fragmentary in
form (that is to say, not covering the entire episode as well as
comprising discrete blocks of text). Unlike the early drafts of the
other episodes however, where the fragmentary form is only a
compositional peculiarity and one to be removed in subsequent drafts,
the fragmentary form abides in the final text of “Wandering
Rocks” (I am thinking here of the “Proteus” NLI
36,639/7A, “Cyclops” Buffalo V.A.8 and “Circe”
Buffalo V.A.19 drafts).

But perhaps a lost copybook does
not even need to be posited. Each of the nineteen sections of
“Wandering Rocks” is short (Father Conmee’s is
about two hundred lines in the Gabler edition) and in composing them
Joyce could have strung together sets of laconics on a par with
“Dilly’s kitchen”. The genetic traces of these
associational shorthands may be discernible in the first stratum of
interpolations. As such, the first stratum would not be
‘interpolations’ in the strict sense of the word but
rather a trellis or array of nodes about which the rest of the
episode was subsequently built. On a larger scale the fragmentary
nature of the episode is a consequence of this. Whether or not Joyce
ever intended to impose a unity on “Wandering Rocks”
comparable to that of the other episodes is unknown, but the ease
with which he could dictate the “initial style” (LI:
129) to Budgen in early 1919 paved the way for its disruption and
eventual abandonment.

2The
letters between Quinn, Hackett, Pound and the Joyces are, unless
otherwise stated, taken from Myron Schwartzman, “Quinnigins
Quake! John Quinn’s Letters to James Joyce, 1916–1920”,
Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 81 (1978), pp. 216–60.
Letter from Quinn to Hackett, 3 March 1917. In response to
Quinn’s initial offer, Hackett replied on 5 March that he was
“quite willing to have one-half of the fine piece of
philanthropy you have in mind for James Joyce.”

B.L.
Reid, The Man from New York (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1968), pp. 274–75: commenting on the affair in a
Limerick, Pound wrote on 19 April:

The ex-Irlandais that hight
Hackett

Attempted to purloin Joyce’s
jacket

But the Godly J. Quinn

Forestalled him in sin

And purloined Hackett’s
hindpart to smack it.

3
Letter from Quinn to Joyce, 7, July 1917. Quinn wanted to give the
specialist, a Dr. John R. Shannon, a copy of Joyce’s account
of his eye troubles.

4
Letter from Pound to Quinn quoted in Sam Slote, Ulysses in the
Plural: The Variable Editions of Joyce’s Novel (Dublin:
National Library of Ireland, 2004), p. 5. The undated letter was
received 13 October 1917. Ibid., p. 40n7.

11
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of
Ulysses, Clive Hart, intro. op. cit., p. 125. The Weber
catalogue and the rules of the game are reproduced in Thomas Faerber
and Markus Luchsinger, Joyce in Zürich (Zürich:
Unionsverlag, 1988), p. 83. Thanks to Ruth Frehner
for help with the translation.

13Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the
Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 80. The unwritten “Entr’acte
for Ulysses in middle of book” (LI: 149) would of
course have re-established a centre.

14
Rodney Wilson Owen has shown how Joyce used an entry from the
Trieste “Alphabetical Notebook” of 1907–1909 “Lust
/ The reek of lions” (JJA 7:140) and a passage from Giacomo
Joyce “sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, melting
breast ointment” for the scene where Bloom reads Sweets of
Sin (U 10.620–23) but his conclusion that the
nucleus for “Wandering Rocks” was formed in 1907 is
unconvincing. Rodney Wilson Owen, James Joyce and the Beginnings
of Ulysses (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983), pp. 4,
65–66.

15
Wim Van Mierlo, in his analysis of the Subject Notebook has traced
material on p. [8v] to “Wandering Rocks”: “professor
Pokorny of Vienna makes an interesting point out of that. […]
He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines
said” (“Wandering Rocks” Rosenbach Manuscript,
fol. 38, U-syn 534.18–22, now U 10.1078–82 – bold
indicates the words that derive from those in the notebook). See Wim
Van Mierlo, “The Subject Notebook: A Nexus in the Composition
History of Ulysses—A Preliminary Analysis” in
this number of GJS.

17
James Joyce, Joyce’s Notes and Early Drafts for Ulysses:
Selections from the Buffalo Collection, Phillip Herring, ed.
(Charlottesville: published for the Bibliographical Society of the
University of Virginia, by U.P. of Virginia, 1977), pp. 23, 30.

19
The OED gives “An umbrella, esp.
one tied up in a loose, untidy fashion.” Is there something of
this in the Rosenbach Manuscript? A typist’s word-skip
produced the “sanded umbrella” (TS V.B.8, fol. 16, JJA
13:22) which occurs in the 1922 edition (p. 232). Gabler restored
“tired” (U-syn 518.26) but is it possible that Joyce’s
current hand recorded “tied”? See Facsimile MS
“Wandering Rocks”, fol. 27. The more-tenuous links with
“Proteus” were severed as the “sanded and
seaweary” maids become “fresh from their whiff of the
briny” in the Budgen overlay and on the fourth setting of
gathering 15 (JJA 24:124).

20
“Episode X” of Ulysses appeared in two numbers of
the Little Review, vi.2, pp. 34–45, and vi.3, pp.
28–47, in June and July 1919.

21
Additionally, the word “walked” is transposed. See U-syn
512.17. Hans Walter Gabler misses that “From the sundial
towards James’s gate walked” was an addition to the
text. The words are bunched in between the section-defining set of
asterisks and the first words of the section, “Mr Kernan”.
The addition of the sundial necessitated the change of street name.
Moving Tom Kernan from Thomas Street back to James’s Street
provides more than just local colour; no doubt it was made in
accordance with some city-crossing calculations of Joyce’s.
Kernan had to be delayed.

22
Identified as early as Don Gifford’s Notes for Joyce: An
Annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), p. 221. For some
reason Rose and O’Hanlon contend that Joyce did not
conclusively use any Irish newspaper before June 1919 when he used
The Irish Independent for June 16 and 17, 1904 in “Cyclops”.
The earliest traces of the last pink they find are in the draft of
“Eumaeus” (Buffalo V.A.21). Danis Rose and John
O’Hanlon, The Lost Notebook, op. cit., pp.
xxiii–xxiv.

23Thom’s for 1904 and 1905 do list a Morphy or two in
addition to pages upon pages of
Murphys. And the ratio of 2-1 in favour
of “Murphy” in the Evening Telegraph might
also cause one to plumb for it
over “Morphy”. The
student’s name, however, as
recorded in The
Dublin University Calendar for the Year 1903–4,
was George Newcomon Morphy. In the absence of further digging I take
the latter publication as an authoritative source for the student
cyclists’ names: Charles Joseph Adderley
(Senior
Fresh); Walter H. Townsend Gahan
(Junior
Bachelor); Maurice Cherry Greene
(Junior
Soph); James Alfred Jackson
(Senior
Soph); Julian
Babington Jones, (Junior
Soph);
George
Newcomon
Morphy, (Senior
Fresh);
Alexander Robert Munro
(Junior
Soph);
Thomas Maurice Patey
(Senior
Soph); Cecil
Scaife (B.A.
Junior Bachelor); Frederick
Stevenson (Junior
Soph);
Harry
Thrift (Junior
Soph,
Sch.) and William
Evelyn Wylie
(Senior
Soph).
The
Dublin University Calendar for the Year 1903–4,
vol. 2. (Dublin:
Dublin University
Press, 1904),
pp. 103–13.

24But is there something of an incipient capital J
for “J. J. Comyn” in Budgen’s
horizontal mark by the W of “W. C. Huggard”? See
Facsimile MS “Wandering Rocks”, fol. 47. This
implies a currente calamo rejection of J. J. Comyn and,
perhaps, a more immediate use of the newspaper in the preparation of
the manuscript than I am suggesting.

25
John Kidd, “The Scandal of Ulysses”, New York
Review of Books 35.11 (June 30, 1988).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4379;
John Kidd, “The Context of the First Salvo in the Joyce Wars”,
Studies in the Novel 22.2 (summer 1990), pp. 237–42. It
is no great display of scholarly acumen to claim that the cyclists
were real people when we have known since the seventies that this
portion of the text was culled from the Dublin Evening Telegraph.
Newspapers rarely devote column inches to the sporting achievements
of fictional characters. John Kidd does not mention Harry Thrift’s
status as a Scholar of Trinity College – perhaps future
editions of Ulysses in their dedication to verisimilitude
will restore the “sch.” that the newspaper appropriately
accords him.

29
The words elided, “immediate hereditary”, were added on
the first setting of placard 24 (JJA18:235).

30
Litz, A. Walton, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake(London: Oxford
University Press, 1961), pp. 132–139. James Joyce, The
Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Robert Scholes and Richard M.
Kain, eds. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p.
108, also provides a transcript of the scene.

31
The only evidence we have of another document that has disappeared
since comes, again, from Bernard Gheerbrant. Item 254 in the La Hune
catalogue consists of ten sheets of fragments of dialogue (which
were worked into “Scylla and Charybdis”). This document
vanished in the move from Paris to the University at Buffalo.
Bernard Gheerbrant, ed., James Joyce: Sa Vie, Son Œuvre,
Son Rayonnement (Paris: La Hune, 1949).